THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE FOURTEENTH
CENTURY
§ 1. GENERAL. Gower's work shows that at the end of the century Latin
and French still shared with English the place of a literary language.
But their hold was precarious.
Latin was steadily losing ground. The Wiclifite translation of the Bible
threatened its hitherto unchallenged position as the language of the
Church; and the Renaissance had not yet come to give it a new life among
secular scholars.
French was still spoken at the court; but in 1387 Trevisa remarks (p.
149) that it was no longer considered an essential part of a gentleman's
education: and he records a significant reform—the replacement of
French by English as the medium of teaching in schools. After the end of
the century Anglo-French, the native development of Norman, was
practically confined to legal use, and French of Paris was the accepted
standard French.
English gained wherever Latin and French lost ground. But though the
work of Chaucer, Gower, and Wiclif foreshadows the coming supremacy of
the East Midland, or, more particularly, the London dialect, there was
as yet no recognized standard of literary English. The spoken language
showed a multiplicity of local varieties, and a writer adopted the
particular variety that was most familiar to him. Hence it is almost
true to say that every considerable text requires a special grammar.
Confusion is increased by the scribes. Nowadays a book is issued in
hundreds or thousands of uniform copies, and within a few months of
publication it may be read in any part of the world. In the fourteenth
century a book was made known to readers only by the slow and costly
multiplication of manuscripts. The copyist might work long after the
date of composition, and he would then be likely to modernize the
language, which in its written form was not stable as it is at present:
so of Barbour's _Bruce_ the oldest extant copies were made nearly a
century after Barbour's death. Again, if the dialect of the author were
unfamiliar to the copyist, he might substitute familiar words and forms.
Defective rimes often bear witness to these substitutions.
Nor have we to reckon only with copyists, who are as a rule careless
rather than bold innovators. While books were scarce and many could not
read them, professional minstrels and amateur reciters played a great
part in the transmission of popular literature; and they, whether from
defective memory or from belief in their own talents, treated the exact
form and words of their author with scant respect. An extreme instance
is given by the MSS. of _Sir Orfeo_ at ll. 267-8:
Auchinleck MS.: _His harp, whereon was al his gle,
He hidde in an holwe tre;_
Harley MS.: _He takeþ his harpe and makeþ hym gle,
And lyþe al nyȝt vnder a tre;_
Ashmole MS.: _In a tre þat was holow
Þer was hys haule euyn and morow._
If the Ashmole MS. alone had survived we should have no hint of the
degree of corruption.
And so, before the extant MSS. recorded the text, copyists and reciters
may have added change to change, jumbling the speech of different men,
generations, and places, and producing those 'mixed' texts which are the
will-o'-the-wisps of language study.
Faced with these perplexities, beginners might well echo the words of
Langland's pilgrims in search of Truth:
_This were a wikked way, but whoso hadde a gyde
That wolde folwen vs eche a fote._
There is no such complete guide, for the first part of Morsbach's
_Mittelenglische Grammatik_, Halle 1896, remains a splendid fragment,
and Luick's _Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache_, Leipzig
1914-, which promises a full account of the early periods, is still far
from completion. Happily two distinguished scholars—Dr. Henry Bradley
in _The Making of English_ and his chapter in _The Cambridge History
of English Literature_, vol. i, Dr. O. Jespersen in _Growth and
Structure of the English Language_—have given brief surveys of the
whole early period which are at once elementary and authoritative. But
for the details the student must rely on a mass of dissertations and
articles of very unequal quality, supplemented by introductions to
single texts, and, above all, by his own first-hand observations made on
the texts themselves.
Some preliminary considerations will be helpful, though perhaps not
altogether reassuring:
(i) A great part of the evidence necessary to a thorough knowledge of
spoken Middle English has not come down to us, a considerable part
remains unprinted, and the printed materials are so extensive and
scattered that it is easy to overlook points of detail. For instance, it
might be assumed from rimes in _Gawayne_, _Pearl_, and the Shropshire
poet Myrc, that the falling together of OE. _-ang-_, _-ung-_, which is
witnessed in NE. _among_ (OE. _gemang_), _-monger_ (OE. _mangere_), was
specifically West Midland, if the occurrence of examples in Yorkshire
(XVII 397-400) escaped notice. It follows that, unless a word or form is
so common as to make the risk of error negligible, positive
evidence—the certainty that it occurs in a given period or district—is
immeasurably more important than negative evidence—the belief that it
never did occur, or even the certainty that it is not recorded, in a
period or district. For the same reason, the statement that a word or
form is found 'in the early fourteenth century' or 'in Kent' should
always be understood positively, and should not be taken to imply that
it is unknown 'in the thirteenth century' or 'in Essex', as to which
evidence may or may not exist.
(ii) It is necessary to clear the mind of the impression, derived from
stereotyped written languages, that homogeneity and stability are
natural states. Middle English texts represent a spoken language of many
local varieties, all developing rapidly. So every linguistic fact should
be thought of in terms of time, place, and circumstance, not because
absolute precision in these points is attainable, but because the
attempt to attain it helps to distinguish accurate knowledge from
conclusions which are not free from doubt.
If the word or form under investigation can be proved to belong to the
author's original composition, exactness is often possible. In the
present book, we know nearly enough the date of composition of extracts
I, III, VIII, X, XI _a_, XII, XIII, XIV; the place of composition of I,
III, X, XI _a_, XII, XIII, XVI, XVII (see map).
But if, as commonly happens, a form cannot be proved to have stood in
the original, endless difficulties arise. It will be necessary first to
determine the date of the MS. copy. This is exactly known for _The
Bruce_, and there are few Middle English MSS. which the palaeographer
cannot date absolutely within a half-century, and probably within a
generation. The place where the MS. copy was written is known nearly
enough for IV _b_, _c_, XII, XIV _e_, XV _b_, _c_ (possibly Leominster),
XVI, XVII; and ME. studies have still much to gain from a thorough
inquiry into the provenance of MSS. Yet, when the extant copy is placed
and dated, it remains to ask to what extent this MS. reproduces some
lost intermediary of different date and provenance; how many such
intermediaries there were between the author's original and our MS.;
what each has contributed to the form of the surviving copy—questions
usually unanswerable, the consideration of which will show the
exceptional linguistic value of the _Ayenbyte_, where we have the
author's own transcript exactly dated and localized, so that every word
and form is good evidence.
Failing such ideal conditions, it becomes necessary to limit doubt by
segregating for special investigation the elements that belong to the
original composition. Hence the importance of rimes, alliteration, and
rhythm, which a copyist or reciter is least likely to alter without
leaving a trace of his activities.
§ 2. DIALECTS. At present any marked variation from the practice of
educated English speakers might, if it were common to a considerable
number of persons, be described as dialectal. But as there was no such
recognized standard in the fourteenth century, it is most convenient to
consider as dialectal any linguistic feature which had a currency in
some English-speaking districts but not in all. For example, _þat_ as a
relative is found everywhere in the fourteenth century and is not
dialectal; _þire_ 'these' is recorded only in Northern districts, and so
is dialectal. Again, _ǭ_ represents OE. _ā_ in the South and
Midlands, while the North retains _ā_ (§ 7 b i): since neither
_ǭ_ nor _ā_ is general, both may be called dialectal.
If a few sporadic developments be excluded because they may turn up
anywhere at any time, then, provided sufficient evidence were
available,[29] it would be possible to mark the boundaries within which
any given dialectal feature occurs at a particular period: we could draw
the line south of which _þire_ 'these' is not found, or the line
bounding the district in which the Norse borrowing _kirke_ occurs; just
as French investigators in _L'Atlas linguistique de la France_ have
shown the distribution of single words and forms in the modern French
dialects.
[Foot-note 29: Sufficient evidence is not available. If in the year 1340
at every religious house in the kingdom a native of the district had
followed the example of Michael of Northgate, and if all their autograph
copies had survived, we should have a very good knowledge of Middle
English at that time. If the process had been repeated about every ten
years the precision of our knowledge would be greatly increased. For the
area in which any feature is found is not necessarily constant: we know
that in the pres. p. the province of _-ing_ was extending throughout the
fourteenth century; that the inflexion _-es_ in 3 sg. pres. ind. was a
Northern and North-Midland feature in the fourteenth century, but had
become general in London by Shakespeare's time. And though less is known
about the spread of sound changes as distinct from analogical
substitutions, it cannot be assumed that their final boundaries were
reached and fixed in a moment. There is reason to regret the handicap
that has been imposed on ME. studies by the old practice of writing in
Latin or French the documents and records which would otherwise supply
the exactly dated and localized specimens of English that are most
necessary to progress.]
Of more general importance is the fixing of boundaries for sound changes
or inflexions that affect a large number of words, a task to which
interesting contributions have been made in recent years on the evidence
of place-names (see especially A. Brandl, _Zur Geographie der
altenglischen Dialekte_, Berlin 1915, which supplements the work of
Pogatscher on the compounds of _street_ and of Wyld on the ME.
developments of OE. _y_). For example, on the evidence available, which
does not permit of more than rough indications, OE. _ā_ remains
_ā_, and does not develop to _ǭ_, north of a line drawn west from
the Humber (§ 7 b i); _-and(e)_ occurs in the ending of the pres. p. as
far south as a line starting west from the Wash (§ 13 ii); farther south
again, a line between Norwich and Birmingham gives the northern limit
for _Stratton_ forms as against _Stretton_ (§ 8 iv, note).[30] The
direction of all these lines is roughly east and west, yet no two
coincide. But if the developments of OE. _y_ (§ 7 b ii) are mapped out,
_u_ appears below a line drawn athwart from Liverpool to London, and
normal _e_ east of a line drawn north and south from the western border
of Kent. Almost every important feature has thus its own limits, and the
limits of one may cross the limits of another.
[Foot-note 30: The evidence of place-names does not agree entirely with
the evidence of texts. _Havelok_, which is localized with reasonable
certainty in North Lincolnshire, has _(a)dradd_ in rimes that appear to
be original, and these indicate a North-Eastern extension of the area in
which OE. _strǣt_, _drǣdan_ appear for normal Anglian _strēt_,
_drēda(n)_. This evidence, supported by rimes in Robert of Brunne, is
too early to be disposed of by the explanation of borrowing from other
dialects, nor is the testimony of place-names so complete and
unequivocal as to justify an exclusive reliance upon it.]